MOUNTAIN LOG COWBOY COUNTRY 51 GLACIER NATIONAL PARK Glacier National Park stretches from northwestern Montana into Canada. Both it, Yellowstone and the Tetons are very popular for casual tourists as well as walkers. Therefore, accommodation is expensive and must be booked many months in advance. The only road through Glacier, known as Going-to-the-Sun Road, was opened in 1932. It is a single carriageway and is always busy; parking places on it are full by 7.00am. However, there is a free shuttle bus service from the car parks on the edges of the park. The focal point of the park is Logan Pass (2,026m), located on a triple divide, where rivers to the west flow to the Pacific Ocean while those to the south are destined for the Atlantic Ocean, and those to the east discharge into Hudson Bay, their waters eventually ending up in the Arctic Ocean. Our best walk of the tour was to Grinnell Lake on the eastern side of the park. The 18km round trip, with a 550m height gain, took us to a lake into which a glacier is melting. Whilst we basked in warm sunshine, the lake water was close to freezing. A ridge separates Grinnell Lake from a deep valley on the other side. A ledge has been carved into the rock on the slopes of this valley, and this ledge is part of Glacier’s renowned Highline Trail, a full day’s hike of 21.4km. The Highline Trail starts at Logan Pass on a gradual incline (with only 300m of height gain), passes through Haystack Pass and goes on to the Granite Park Chalet (a hut where it is possible to sleep), eventually coming down to the Going-to-the-Sun Road, where the shuttle bus can collect you. En route, you have the option of climbing to the ridge (300m of a steep climb) to overlook Grinnell Lake. The bedrock in Glacier is sedimentary (or metamorphosed sedimentary) rock and is up to 1.7 billion years old. Micro-fossils found here pushed the established start of life on Earth back a billion years (the oldest known fossils are 3.7 billion years old).
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